Amazon crushed its earnings Amazon crushed its earnings

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.Michael Seto/Business Insider

Amazon announced its first-quarter financial results on Thursday, and it blew by what Wall Street was looking for.

The stock was up about 4% in after-hours trading following the report.

Here were the key numbers:

• Revenue of $35.71 billion, versus Wall Street estimates of $35.3 billion. A nice beat. This was $29.1 billion a year ago.
• EPS of $1.48, versus estimates of $1.13 per share, non-GAAP. This compares with non-GAAP EPS of $1.07 per share a year ago. A big beat as well.

Analysts were also closely watching the performance of Amazon's cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services.

AWS reported $3.66 billion in revenue and 43% growth, which beat the analyst consensus of $3.65 billion in revenue and 42% growth. Last quarter, AWS didn't grow quite as fast as people had expected.

Even though it beat predictions, AWS growth still slowed down. In the previous three quarters, AWS experienced 47%, 55%, and 58% growth.

Other key stats:

• Overall, first-quarter sales were up 23%.
• Retail subscription services, which is mostly Amazon Prime but includes a few other things, like music, hit $1.94 billion, up 49% year-over-year.

Next quarter, Amazon expects sales of between $35.25 billion and $37.75 billion, or to grow by between 16% and 24% compared with Q2 2016.

This factors in $720 million of headwinds from foreign-exchange rates, the company says. That's right in line with what the Street is looking for, with analysts expecting $36.84 billion.

Here's the full Amazon press release.

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